When was the last time you saw a really good thriller/romantic-comedy/’80s-music-tribute
film up on the big screen? Not since Mel Gibson’s Hamlet,
right? But seriously, I think that Cherish, the new
film from writer/director Finn Taylor, has introduced
a brand new genre to the world of cinema, a rare feat these
days. However, it would’ve been nice had said movie been a
little bit… well, better, to back up its inventiveness. Not
that it’s a bad, horrible, awful film. Actually, I enjoyed
myself for the most part while I was in the theater. Unfortunately,
Cherish is one of those movies that begins to rapidly
fall apart in your mind, when you’re in the car driving home.
Herewith, a breakdown…

The plot concerns a semi-go-getter by the name of Zoe Adler,
played by Robin Tunney. She’s a fairly unpopular, fairly
inept mess of a woman, spending most of her time going on
viciously bad first dates, listening to the local ’80s music
station and mooning after the office heartthrob, played by
Jason Priestly. Priestly, by the way, is hilarious
in this, even though he’s only in it for 15 minutes, tops.
He sends up his teen idol persona magnificently and comes
off quite well in the process. This guy needs a starring role
to sink his teeth into, stat. Anyhoo, after a night of many
drinks, Zoe finds herself forced into a car by a mystery man
whom we, the audience, know to be her stalker. He forces her
to drive and causes her to run down a policeman, leaving her
arrested and imprisoned. She is sentenced to a house-arrest
type situation, forced to wear a lowjack bracelet on her ankle
and is forbidden from moving more than 50 feet from the modem
that controls it. Tending the machinery is Bill, the very
pinnacle of white-collar stuffiness, played by the extremely
underused and underrated Tim Blake Nelson, of O
Brother, Where Art Thou? fame. They begin a tentative
tango of burgeoning interest; all the while, Zoe’s stalker
waits in the wings and you just know he’s going to strike
in the last reel of the film.

What’s so frustrating about this well-meaning film is that
it suffers from the number one ailment of multi-genre pictures:
It cannot for the life of it decide what kind of movie it
wants to be. Taylor has writing and directing chops, obviously,
and had he decided to make just a romantic comedy or
just a thriller, I think the movie would have been
great. But in Cherish, you can practically feel the
two conflicting genres elbowing each other out of the way,
which is mighty distracting once you’ve gotten into the rhythm
of one or the other. In particular, I think that the entire
stalker plot feels shoehorned in, intruding on what could
have been a fantastically caustic, neo-Ally-McBeal love story.

In a way, I actually feel bad harping on Cherish.
It’s such an amiable slacker of a film, it’s almost unfair
to give it too much grief. And there are some good things
that bear mentioning. As I hinted earlier, the acting is nice,
with the exception of the stunt casting of Liz Phair,
who really can’t act, God bless her. Tunney gives a multilayered
performance that, one hopes, will get her some good roles
and Nelson is just aces here, particularly toward the end
of the film.

All in all, it’s not a terrible film. It’s got some laughs
and some good performances, so if you should see it, you won’t
be totally wasting your time. If I were you, I’d try to time
my bathroom and popcorn refill breaks during the parts that
concern anything to do with being thrilling. They’re just
in the way, so this will allow you to focus on the good love
story that could have been.